Ron Paul On Mental Health Screening

Ron Paul On Mental Health Screening

In 2011, Congressman Ron Paul recognized the dangers of mental health screening for schoolchildren and introduced the Parental Consent Act to block federal funding for such programs, warning they would label kids based on vague criteria and funnel them into pharmaceutical pipelines. He was right. Although the bill did not pass, in 2012 the notorious TeenScreen program—once implemented across 47 U.S. states—was finally abolished after it was revealed that the program had an 84% false positive rate, leading countless students to be misidentified and pushed onto drugs with serious side effects, including suicidal ideation. With a new Illinois law recently enacted to implement “mental health screening” for students in grades 3 through 12, it is time to revisit the abject failures of such screening programs and the never-ending targeting of schoolchildren by the mental health industry.